The Wikimedia movement is the global community of contributors to the Wikimedia projects, including Wikipedia. The Wikimedia Foundation is the non-profit that supports these contributors and projects. For the last four years the Foundation’s Communications department has built and supported an open – anyone can edit – style blog using WordPress. It’s called Diff (diff.wikimedia.org) and it’s a multilingual blog that anyone can edit…or well, at least submit a post to be published.
Along the way we’ve learned some important and interesting lessons on how to allow anyone to submit a post, review and publish, while allowing for unique voices and perspectives. We’re using a mix of some off-the-shelf plugins, a bit of custom code, and bending WordPress and multilingualism to the extreme ends of how it’s “supposed” to work.
This session will introduce you to how we pulled this all off, some of the ways we’ve given back to the WordPress community, the challenges we’ve faced, and ideas on how you can run an open community blog.